companion, this gourmand ready for every pleasure, for a supper, for cards, for a love-affair, the practical philosopher who should when the hour arrived nimbly change his weapon. And the hour had struck several months ago; of the 600,000f. left him by his father scarcely 40,000 remained, and this winter the supple Southerner had begun to execute the programme of is thirty-second year--a successful marriage. The originality of this project lay in the peculiar conditions he affixed to it. In the first place, he had perceived that, even if enriched by the most fortunate marriage, his situation at Paris would never be what he wished. His defeat at an aristocratic club, to which he had attempted to gain admittance, trusting of certain influence imprudently offered and accepted, had shown him the difference between mere comradeship and a solid standing in society. Two or three visits to Nice had revealed the cosmopolitan world to him, and, with his superior cleverness, he had divined its resources. He had resolved to marry some stranger who had a good standing in the society of Europe. He dreamed of passing the winter on the coast, the summer in the Alps, the hunting season in Scotland, the autumn on his wife's estate, and a few festive weeks in Paris in the spring. This plan of existence presupposed that his wife should not be a mere young girl. Corancez wished her to be a widow, older than himself if need be, and yet still beautiful in her autumn. As he based his hopes of success mainly upon his youthful and handsome appearance, it was desirable that the matrimonial labors should not be too severe. An Italian Marquise, belonging by birth to the highest Venetian aristocracy, the widow of a nobleman, left with an income of 200,000f., irreproachable in character, and devotedly religious, which would save her from any love-affairs unsanctioned by marriage, and nevertheless led by the influence of her Anglomaniac brother into cosmopolitan life, was the ideal of all his hopes, embodied as though by enchantment. But all the apples of Hesperides have their dragon, and the mythical monster was in this case represented by the brother, the Count Alvise Navagero, a doubtful personage under his snobbish exterior, who well understood how to keep for his own use the millions of his deceased brother-in-law, Francesco Bonnacorsi. How had the Provençal trickery eluded the Venetian watchfulness? Even to this day, when those events are things of the past, the five o'clock _habitués_ of the yacht club at Cannes confess themselves unable to explain it, such astuteness had the ingenious Corancez employed in preparing the mine without arousing a suspicion of his subterranean labor. And four short months had sufficed. Through an inner conflict of emotions and of scruples, of timidity and passion, the Marquise Andryana had been brought to accept the idea of a secret marriage, finding no other way to satisfy the ardor with which